zenosanalytic:

garbagefingers:

heyitsangryangel:

Has anyone posted this yet? It’s phenomenal.

“[…] the complete and inarguable disaster of the Bush administration—a failure of the conservative movement itself, one undeniable even to many consumers of the parallel conservative media—and his abrupt replacement by a black man, caused a national nervous breakdown among the people who’d been told, for many years, that conservatism could not fail, and that all Real Americans agreed with them.

Rather rapidly, two things happened: First, Republicans realized they’d radicalized their base to a point where nothing they did in power could satisfy their most fervent constituents. Then—in a much more consequential development—a large portion of the Republican Congressional caucus became people who themselves consume garbage conservative media, and nothing else.”

Reblogging to read later, you had me at “they’d radicalized their base to a point where nothing they did in power could satisfy their most fervent constituents.”

I object to the claim that periodicals like The Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, and National Review mislead their readers unintentionally, and given the long connection between the right wing and conspiratorial thinking(The Paranoid Style in American Politics was written in 1964, and you can draw that line further back to the Confederacy, beyond it to Jackson) I don’t think you can really say this is entirely new, or was ever entirely aimed only at “non-elites”, and Reagan is a product of this, not previous to it. BUT, having said all that, this is mostly polemical rather than scholarly and the devs he talks about are new, even if in different ways than he identifies, so is a good piece I think.

The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up in the World’s Face